The AJC Bose Indian Botanical Garden, previously known as Indian Botanic Garden, in Shibpur has developed a nature trail for its visitors, complete with paved pathways, straw-thatched gazebos and a bamboo bridge over a small lake that give the walker a feel of a forested pathway.
Spread over 15 acres near its ornamental garden, the nature trail has about 2km of paths that run through a densely vegetated area.
The canopy is thick and paths are often blocked by giant spider webs, the stillness broken with shrill cries of the nesting birds.
The trail was inaugurated on August 10 by Leena Nandan, secretary of the ministry of environment, forest and climate change.
“We wanted to create an educative experience for school and college students amidst nature. They can see a variety of mushrooms, fungi and birds in the water bodies. We want to raise environmental awareness among children. It has been built with discarded materials in the garden. We used old bricks from dilapidated structures to pave the paths and stumps of trees destroyed during Cyclone Amphan in 2020. We spent hardly Rs 10,000 in creating this trail,” said director Devendra Singh.
Trees like the cannonball tree (Couroupita guianensis), which bears a large, spherical woody fruit that resembles a rusty cannonball, have been labelled on wooden
plates to help visitors identify the variety of flora along the trail.
Juicy star fruits hung from the upper branches of a huge Carambola tree.
The Samanea saman or the rain tree has a huge canopy that provides shade from the sun as well as the rain.
“The trail has a repository of 300 species of flowering plants along with many
other life forms which include several endemic and threatened plants,” said the director.
Borrowing names from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, the trail has paths called the Panchavati Path which runs through a number of banyan trees with prop
roots. The Dandakaranya Path is particularly dark and dense and the Madhuvana Path has a number of plants that attract bees.
In a bid to attract visitors, the garden has been undertaking projects like developing
an ornamental flower garden, a mangrove section, red sandalwood tree avenue (a path lined with red sandalwood trees), magnolia grandiflora avenue (path lined with magnolia trees), a Sita Ashoka avenue (a path lined with Ashoka trees.
And now comes the nature trail.
The garden had previously launched an app which would help visitors identify trees.
“The app needs to be updated and we are going to outsource it,” said the director.